If violence against presidents is a kind of fringe religion in our country’s history, as Yale Repertory’s current production of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins (1990) argues, then John Wilkes Booth is its patron saint. …

Lights like gilded silver unfurl, un-rushed, over anguished violin. Figures emerge in turns from the receding darkness, draped in woolly gray-brown fashions from a time long past. Thick cascades of dust pour out from their …